Left front view of flight 46, Orville turning to the left, in the last photographed flight of 1905; Huffman Prairie, Dayton, Ohio

A Practical Machine: The Wright Brothers in Dayton

Orville and Wilbur Wright wanted to create a practical machine—not a novelty or a gimmick—and they accomplished that at Ohio’s Huffman Prairie on October 5, 1905.
Russian dissident Bukovsky during a press conference at Schiphol Airport, 1977

Dissident Memoirs Across Rust-Iron Curtains

Soviet dissident memoirs, like their authors, had to cross the Iron Curtain—an iron curtain of meaning and interpretation.
Jane Goodall watching her photographer husband, Baron Hugo Von Lawick, adjust a camera, to which a baboon is clinging, in the Gombe Reserve, east central Africa.

Jane Goodall

An intellectual powerhouse and dedicated conservationist, Goodall showed generations of humans how to engage with—and take care of—the natural world.
A photograph of trash pickers from the Waste Matters Project

Waste Pickers Unite!

As one family’s story reveals, labor organizing and the development of a co-op for waste collection has improved conditions for precariously employed workers in India.
Image Updown Girl left and Worth Matravers boy Right.

Two Seventh-Century People Found With West African Ancestry

A story of diversity and integration in early Anglo-Saxon society.
A student at Tuskegee University in Alabama learns to print a newspaper page in the Institute's printing works, ca. 1955

The Enduring Value of Student Newspapers

More than curiosities, college papers are unique pedagogical tools that help undergraduates achieve media literacy.
Dancer surrounded by others foragers

The Bee Dance Debate

Can insects communicate? In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists disagreed on whether bees could possess a “language” expressed through motion.
Jonathan Swift by Charles Jervas

What Was Behind Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal?

Swift’s savage animosity towards the Irish Protestant elites is front and center in his biting (perhaps literally) critique of the landlord class.
An astronaut exploring another world

Space Medicine, Peasant Rebellion, and Lots of Fish

Well-researched stories from Literary Hub, Aeon, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
An illustration of a robot among city ruins

The Politics of Our AI Overlords

Fears of AI often focus on domination by algorithm-powered capitalism, but science fiction once used societies ruled by computers as analogs for communism.